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Tag: Hideki Matsui

  • Godzilla Returns: The 2004 MLB Opening Series in Japan

    Godzilla Returns: The 2004 MLB Opening Series in Japan

    by Robert K. Fitts

    Every Monday morning we will post an article from SABR’s award-winning books Nichibei Yakyu: Volumes I and II. Each will present a different chapter in the long history of US-Japan baseball relations. This week Robert Fitts tells us about Hideki Matsui’s triumphant return to Japan with the 2004 New York Yankees.

    “The Yankees are coming! The Yankees are coming!” wrote Marty Kuehnert in the Japan Times. “If you haven’t heard, you’re not a resident who has paid even the slightest attention to TV or radio broadcasts, or print media. It’s hard to miss the news that the New York Yankees are coming to Japan. … Media reports liken it to the arrival of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig who led a MLB All-Star team to Japan in 1934, and was the catalyst for Japanese professional baseball. … Others are saying it is even bigger … and more along the lines the arrival of U.S. Admiral Matthew Perry in 1853 which helped spur the Meiji Restoration.”

    “This is the [Yomiuri] Giants’ 70th anniversary, and also the 70th anniversary of Japanese professional baseball,” noted Kota Ishijima, head of Yomiuri’s overseas operations. “And for that 70th, who comes back? The Yankees, and our beloved son, Hideki Matsui.”

    On November 1, 2002, two days after leading the Yomiuri Giants to the Japan Series championship, Hideki Matsui announced that he would leave Japanese baseball for the major leagues. At the height of his career, he was the most popular player in Japan, outshining even all-time great Ichiro Suzuki. The 28-year-old free agent had played 10 seasons with the Giants, winning three Central League MVP Awards as he hit .304 with 332 home runs. “It was painful to tell my coaches, but my personal desire to go over there and play didn’t go away,” he told reporters at an early-morning press conference. “I’m proud to have played in Japanese baseball and I think it will reinvigorate Japanese baseball if I go over there and play well. I also think new stars will emerge in Japan.”

    The New York Yankees became early favorites to sign the slugger, nicknamed Godzilla because of acne scarring on his face and his tremendous power with the bat, and on December 19, 2002, they agreed to a three-year, $21 million deal. Although Yomiuri fans were disappointed with the news, nearly all supported Matsui’s decisions. “It’s a bit disappointing that he will be gone from Japan’s ballparks,” said Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda. “On the other hand, there are increasingly more global major stages for Japanese players, so I feel proud in that regard. I have mixed feelings.” “I’m looking forward to seeing how many home runs he will hit in the majors,” added Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

    Matsui’s major-league career began on Opening Day, March 31, 2003, as he hit the first pitch he saw for an RBI single off Roy Halladay. A week later, at the Yankees’ home opener, he hit a dramatic grand slam. Although his production dipped in late April and May, he hit .394 with a 1.157 OPS in June, catapulting him into the All-Star Game as a fan-elected starter. He finished the season having played in all 163 of the Yankees’ games, hitting .287 with 16 home runs and finishing second in the American League Rookie of the Year Award voting.

    But Matsui’s true impact came off the field. “He’s not only helping us win games on the field,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman explained, “he’s helping the business side. He generates money not just in New York for us, but overseas.” Soon after the signing, the Yankees and the Yomiuri Corporation established a joint venture called “Yomiuri YankeeNets Marketing” in Tokyo designed to attract Japanese sponsors and sell Yankees tickets to Japanese tourist agencies. “Japanese fly in on package tours from Japan to watch a three-game series in New York, buy Yankees jerseys and Matsui bobblehead dolls, then fly back,” noted Japanese baseball expert Bob Whiting. Japanese attendance at Yankee Stadium increased from around 1,000 per game in 2001 to 5,000 per game in 2003. Sales of Matsui jerseys, T-shirts, and souvenirs soared in early 2003. The Dentsu Consumer Research Center concluded that “Matsui’s overall economic effect for the New York area (including travel, hotels, restaurants, etc.) would reach $500 million for five years.” “Matsui has made a large enough impact on New York’s economy to be hired to promote it by the city’s convention and visitors bureau,” Whiting added.

    Major League Baseball decided to capitalize on Matsui’s popularity to promote the league’s brand in Japan. In mid-November of 2003, Bob DuPuy, MLB’s chief operating officer, wrote to the Yankees asking them to shift their 2004 season-opening series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays from New York to Tokyo. The Yankees had not played in Japan since 1955 and George Steinbrenner had forbidden his players to join the major-league all-star teams traveling to the country (until 2002, when he sent Bernie Williams and Jason Giambi with the goal of wooing Matsui to the Yankees). After a few weeks of negotiations, the Yankees agreed to the trip if they could be the away team in Tokyo and the Devil Rays would play their previously scheduled first homestand against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. But not all of the Yankees were in favor of the trip. Mike Mussina was particularly vocal in his opposition, complaining about how the trip would disrupt his routine and how the long flights could adversely affect the Yankees.

    As ballclubs, the Yankees and Devil Rays were polar opposites. New York had won 101 games in 2003, finishing first in the American League East Division, but lost a frustrating World Series to the Florida Marlins. After the season the team lost starting pitchers Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and David Wells to free agency. Determined to produce a champion, the Yankees reshaped the roster through blockbuster trades and free-agent signings. In December they acquired starting pitchers Kevin Brown from the Dodgers and Javier Vazquez from the Expos. In February they traded for superstar Alex Rodriguez and took on most of his 10-year, $252 million contract – an amount that dwarfed all other sports contracts at the time. The Yankees supplemented these stars by signing All-Star free agents Gary Sheffield, Ruben Sierra, Kenny Lofton, and Tom Gordon. In all, the team opened spring training with 17 former All-Stars on the roster. When they arrived in Japan, the team’s payroll stood at $182.8 million.

    In contrast, the Devil Rays’ payroll was a measly $29.2 million. The team had finished last in the American League East for every season since its creation in 1998. Its highest-paid player was former Yankee Tino Martinez at $7.5 million, followed by Aubrey Huff at $2.66 million, although the team’s most talented player was undoubtedly 22-year-old outfielder Carl Crawford, who would emerge as a star during the 2004 season. Martinez was not the only former Yankee on Tampa’s roster. In January, the team had hired former Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, who had a long history with Japanese baseball. Zimmer first arrived in Japan in 1956 as a 25-year-old member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. On June 23 Hal Jeffcoat had hit Zimmer in the face with a high and inside fastball, shattering his cheekbone. The severe injury ended his season, but the Dodgers took Zimmer to Japan to help him regain his form. Zimmer hit only .091 in 22 at-bats but the experience helped him rebound to become the team’s utility infielder in 1957. After leaving the majors in 1965, Zimmer played a year with the Toei Flyers. It was a tough season, both on and off the diamond. Zimmer did not adapt well to Japanese culture or cuisine and hit a measly .182 in 203 at-bats. Twenty-four years later, he returned to Japan as the manager of the 1990 major-league all-stars. Once again, Japan was unkind to Zimmer as his squad became the first American professional team to have a losing record in a postseason goodwill tour.

    The teams left Florida on separate charter flights around 5 P.M. on Thursday, March 25. After the 17-hour flight, five busloads of Yankees, including Yogi Berra and Reggie Jackson, arrived at their hotel shortly after 2 A.M. on Saturday, March 27. (The extra “day” was accounted for by their crossing the international date line.) The Devil Rays checked in about an hour later. “I went to sleep at 4,” explained Derek Jeter, “got up at 5:30. Then I went back to sleep for about an hour, ate, [and] went back to sleep for 45 minutes.”

    The jet-lagged and weary players arrived at Tokyo Dome in the early afternoon for a public workout. 34,500 fans, mostly children in baseball uniforms, “shrieked for hours” as “six aisles filled with cheerleaders wearing Yankees and Devil Rays jerseys and hot pants, shaking silver and gold pompoms,” cheered along. The kids, who were primarily there to see Matsui, “squealed with delight as the video board focused on the … star … as soon as he emerged from the third base dugout to stretch.” “We had a chance to see some of their faces when Matsui walked by,” said Jeter. “It was something special. I think it’s something they’re going to remember for the rest of their lives.”

    “Hideki is like Michael Jordan; he’s the man when it comes to Japan. … He is as big as anybody on the planet over there,” noted Jason Giambi. “It’s a little bit like the Beatles arriving in New York,” added assistant general manager Jean Afterman. “I guess it was J.F.K. who said, ‘I’m the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.’ Well, we’re the team that’s accompanying Hideki Matsui back to Tokyo.” “[W]e are proud of Hideki as a representative of the Japanese people,” explained Gaku Tashiro of Sankei Sports. “He’s very gentle, a very good guy. Japanese fans understand what he wanted to do. I know some Giants fans love him still. I’m sure he will hear big cheers in the Tokyo Dome.”

    “Because of Hideki, other Yankees are famous now,” said Tashiro. “Japanese fans recognize who they are – Giambi, A-Rod, Jeter. They are going to have big cheers, too.” “The Yankees were like rock stars in this baseball crazy land,” the Associated Press’s Ronald Blum observed. “Everywhere they went, people looked at them with awe, as if they were larger than life creatures.” “I didn’t know what to expect,” Jeter said. “But it’s kind of amazing – you go somewhere and people recognize you. It’s kind of overwhelming, considering how far away we are.”

    After the workout, the teams, their families, and Commissioner Bud Selig joined other dignitaries at a reception thrown by Yomiuri Chairman Tsuneo Watanabe. Dressed in festive happi coats, players used baseball bats to break open sake barrels to start the party. Then, none too soon for many of the jet-lagged visitors, the players staggered back to the hotel and did their best to get a full night’s rest before the exhibition games the next day.

    The exhibition games began at noon on March 28 with the Devil Rays playing the Hanshin Tigers at Tokyo Dome. Former Yankee Hideki Irabu took the mound for the Tigers. Irabu, who had starred for the Lotte Chiba Marines, had signed a four-year, $12.8 million contract with the Yankees in 1997. Despite tantalizing flashes of brilliance, he had three disappointing seasons in New York, drawing the ire of George Steinbrenner, who called him a “fat pussy toad.” In disgrace, he was traded to Montreal after the 1999 season, where his mediocrity continued. After playing for the Texas Rangers in 2002, he returned to Japan to play for Hanshin. When a reporter asked if he wanted to see his old teammates while the Yankees were in Tokyo, Irabu curtly responded, “No, I don’t.”

    Against Tampa, Irabu once again flashed his potential brilliance. Relying on control and breaking balls instead of power, he began by striking out Carl Crawford and Julio Lugo, then retired six of the next seven batters. In six innings he scattered six hits (including two solo home runs), walked nobody, and stuck out five. “He was mixing up his pitches,” Lugo commented. “He threw some tough curves, and I couldn’t pick up his split at the beginning. I think he’s a big leaguer. He’s got great stuff.” Devil Rays manager Lou Piniella noticed, “He looked much more relaxed pitching here than he did before, especially when he pitched for the Yankees. … He seemed like he was in control of the ball game. He pitched exceedingly well.”

    Meanwhile the Tigers had little trouble with the Devil Rays’ pitching. Starter Doug Waechter lasted just three innings, giving up seven hits and a walk. The Tigers struck for three runs in the third on five singles and an error. They added two more runs in the fifth as Hanshin’s George Arias homered off Jorge Sosa and another in the sixth, giving Irabu a 6-1 lead as he left the game.

    Hanshin’s bullpen, however, could not hold the lead. Tampa scored three in the eighth as Rocco Baldelli hit a two-out, three-run homer off Tomoyuki Kubota, and tied the game, 7-7, when Lugo hit a two-run blast with two outs in the top of the ninth off Yuya Ando. After the Tigers failed to score in the bottom of the ninth, the game ended in a 7-7 tie. “That’s a good team,” Piniella said after the game. “They got good pitching and played well in the field. They’re not a power-hitting club but they hit it to all areas of the field.”

    The enthusiasm of the Hanshin fans surprised the American players. Their famous oendan (cheering club) blew their horns and whistles, pounded their drums, waved their flags, and chanted their players’ fight songs. “It was sort of, um … interesting, with the festivities going on in the stands the whole time,” said Piniella. “With the drums going and the banners, it took a while to get used to. But it was fun. It was a fun atmosphere.” “I thought it was pretty cool,” added Rocco Baldelli. “I was bobbing my head in the outfield. It was pretty catchy. … They support their team. It must be nice. Every guy that comes up for their team, regardless of if he’s coming off the bench or pitching, they’re all for him, screaming his name. That must feel pretty good as a player.”

    That evening 55,000 fans congregated at Tokyo Dome. A fair-like atmosphere pervaded the plaza in front of the main gate. In the background, the Ferris wheel at the Dome’s amusement park lit up the dark sky as the roller coaster rumbled along, occasional shrieks from the passengers clearly audible over the dull murmur of the crowd. Throngs surrounded the souvenir stands as fans bought Yankees and Giants caps and jerseys, plastic orange clapping sticks, and other mementos.

    For many Japanese fans, this night’s exhibition game between the Yankees and Giants was the most important game of the tour. “It’s not [just] an exhibition game,” explained the Giants’ American outfielder Tuffy Rhodes. “It’s an international World Series game. It’s Game 7 of the international World Series.”

    The game began with Masaichi Kaneda, Japan’s only 400-game winner, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch to catcher Yogi Berra. The two had faced each other during the 1953 Eddie Lopat and 1955 Yankees tours. The stiff-moving 71-year-old Kaneda, dressed in a gray suit with tie, bounced the pitch to Berra, who, wearing his pinstriped Yankees uniform, spryly fielded the errant throw on one hop.

    The sold-out crowd watched Yankees starter Jose Contreras take on Yomiuri’s back-of-the-rotation starter Hisanori Takahashi. To honor Matsui, Torre started him in center field and placed him in the cleanup spot, his spots when he played for Yomiuri. Both teams went down in order in the first with Contreras striking out the side.

    The fans rose to their feet and roared as Matsui came to the plate to lead off the top of the second. Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” bared over the loudspeakers. As he dug in, the ballpark sparkled as thousands of camera flashes went off. The Giants’ oendan drummers in left field banged out a rhythm: boom, boom, boom, boom-boom. The fans responded: “Home run, Mat-sui!” Home run, Mat-sui!” Boom, boom, boom, boom-boom, answered the drums. The deafening cheer continued throughout the at-bat.

    Takahashi wounded up and threw a high fastball. Ball one. Next came a wicked curve, breaking down as Matsui swung over it for a strike. He swung through the next pitch as well. One ball, two strikes. Another high fastball, Matsui checked his swing. Two and two. On the fifth pitch, Takahashi went for the outside corner, but Matsui sliced it foul. Matsui stepped out of the batter’s box, adjusted his belt, and dug back in.

    The fans grew louder, pounding their orange plastic sticks in time with the drums. The upper deck felt as though it was shaking. The chant, “Home run, Mat-sui!” intensified. On the Yankees bench Joe Torre turned to coach Rob Thomson and said, “Wouldn’t it be something if he hit a home run here?”

    Takahashi wound up and tried to sneak a 63-mph curveball by Matsui, but it hung up over the plate. Matsui connected with a loud pop, driving the pitch deep into the right-center-field bleachers. The crowd erupted as the stony-faced Matsui calmly trotted around the bases, only allowing himself to smile after he reached the safety of the crowded dugout.

    Godzilla had returned to Tokyo.

    “Knowing this guy,” backup catcher John Flaherty had told catching coach Gary Tuck, “he’ll probably go deep the first at-bat. You almost have to expect it now,” he added later. “We saw it last year when he hit the grand slam on Opening Day in New York. It’s his personality. You expect it, and he delivers.” But, “it’s hard to do,” added Jeter. “It’s hard enough to hit a home run in batting practice, let alone in a game. He’s a special player to be able to deal with all the attention and scrutiny and deliver like that.”

    Yomiuri tied the ballgame in the third, but the Yankees surged ahead in the fourth as Matsui led off with a single, an out later Giambi singled, and Posada hit a three-run homer. New York tacked on another two runs in the fifth; Jeter led off with a home run, Matsui walked and then scored as a deep drive by Giambi popped out of center fielder Tuffy Rhodes’s glove. The Giants staged a brief comeback attempt in the bottom of the ninth as a single, an error, and a groundout led to a run, but Mariano Rivera closed out the 6-2 victory. “I was really happy to receive such a warm welcome and it gave me power today,” Matsui told reporters after the game. “I just felt like I did what I was expected to do and it’s all thanks to the fans. I just want to keep playing well as the season gets started.”

    Early the next morning, the exhausted and jet-lagged Yankees straggled into Tokyo Dome to prepare for their noon game with the Hanshin Tigers. To please the 52,000 spectators, Torre started most of his regulars, but they made little difference in the game’s outcome as the Yankees’ starter, Donovan Osborne, could not hold back the Tigers’ offense.

    With the Tigers down 1-0 in the bottom of the second, George Arias led off with a single. After Takashi Toritani struck out, Osborne surrendered consecutive singles to Akihiro Yano, Atsushi Fujimoto, and Makoto Imaoka to give the Tigers a 2-1 lead. The next batter, Norihiro Akahoshi, laid down a perfect bunt for a hit as Fujimoto scored. Osborne then walked Mike Kinkade before Tomoaki Kanemoto drove in Imaoka and Akahoshi with a broken-bat single to right-center field. Arias, in his second at-bat of the inning, singled in Kinkade and Kanemoto to put Hanshin ahead 7-1.

    New York retaliated with three runs in the fourth on a two-run homer by John Flaherty and Jeter’s RBI single, and another run in the fifth on a mammoth, 521-foot Tony Clark home run to narrow the gap to 7-5. The Tigers, however, padded their lead in the fifth with an inside-the-park home run as Darren Bragg misjudged Akihiro Yano’s fly ball. After falling to the turf, the ball bounded away from Bragg as Yano circled the bases. Hanshin added three more in sixth on a three-run homer by Arias. Trailing 11-5, the Yankees attempted a two-out comeback in the top of the ninth, scoring twice before Jeff Williams closed out the game for the Tigers’ 11-7 victory.

    Matsui, who was removed after the fourth inning along with most of the Yankees stars, told reporters, “I would have loved to play more for the fans, but the opening game is tomorrow. … I feel good about how I am hitting now. … I’m looking forward to the opener tomorrow.”

    Although the game received scant coverage in the next morning’s newspapers, 47,000 fans packed Tokyo Dome in the evening to watch the Yomiuri Giants take on the Devil Rays. The game began well for the Giants as Toshihisa Nishi singled and Takayuki Shimizu walked to start the game. An out later, Yoshinobu Takahashi singled to drive in Nishi. But that ended the scoring for the home team. Tampa starter Mark Hendrickson gave up just one more hit over the next four innings before relievers Dewon Brazelton and Jesus Colome pitched four innings of shutout ball.

    Yomiuri starter Masanori Hayashi held the major leaguers scoreless, surrendering just one hit while striking out five, in three innings before Tampa took advantage of the Giants’ bullpen. In the fourth inning, the Devil Rays went ahead on a two-run home run by Jose Cruz Jr. Cruz drove in another run with a sacrifice fly in the sixth before Robert Fick drove the ball over the right-field fence with a runner on to give Tampa a 5-1 lead. The Devil Rays tacked on two more runs in the seventh to win 7-1.

    After the warm-up games, the Yankees and Devil Rays readied themselves for the start of the regular season on Tuesday, March 30.

    Following the Opening Day ceremonies, which included first pitches thrown by Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the 2004 major-league season began at 7:14 P.M. Tokyo time (5:14 A.M. EST). The Yankees, acting as the visiting team but wearing their home pinstripes with the addition of a three-inch sleeve patch bearing the sponsor Ricoh’s name in red, batted first against Victor Zambrano.

    The new-look Yankees’ season started off well. After Derek Jeter grounded out, Matsui ripped a fastball into the right-center-field gap for a double. Alex Rodriguez came to the plate in his first at-bat as a Yankee and struck out looking. With two outs, Jason Giambi hit a 1-and-0 pitch into the left-field stands to give New York a 2-0 lead.

    Mike Mussina took the mound for New York. Even after arriving in Japan, he continued to carp about the trip. Suffering from jet lag, he had not slept well, and rather than seeing Tokyo had cloistered himself in his hotel room except for “three quick trips for food.” He later told reporters that he had “subsisted mostly on Ritz crackers and chips.” “It’s a mindset,” Gary Sheffield commented. “If you think negative, it’s going to be negative. If you think you’re tired, you know you’re going to be tired.”

    Although the game started out well for Mussina as he retired the Devil Rays in order in the first, Torre noted that “Mussina wasn’t as sharp as he can be.” He gave up two hits in the second inning and another in the third before Tampa Bay tied the game in the fourth as Mussina walked Cruz and Martinez ahead of a two-run, broken-bat single by Toby Hall.

    The score remained deadlocked until the sixth, when Rodriguez and Sheffield both doubled to put New York ahead 3-2. The lead, however, did not last long as Cruz led off the bottom of the inning with a homer to right. Martinez then doubled off his old teammates before Julio Lugo followed with a double to deep center field, scoring Martinez. Hall stroked another double to score Lugo, giving the Devil Rays a 5-3 lead, which chased Mussina from the game. Tampa Bay scored three more in the bottom of the seventh on an RBI single by Huff and a Martinez home run to seal an 8-3 victory.

    The upset headlined sports pages across the United States: “Yankees Look Lost in Tokyo”; “Tampa Too Much”; “Sluggish Yanks Roughed Up.” “We looked flat,” said Yankees special adviser Reggie Jackson. “But how do you look good when you give up 15 hits? You don’t look good. You don’t pitch good, you don’t look good. … If we lose tomorrow we won’t be in a 747 going home. It will be B&O, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.”

    The following evening Kevin Brown took the mound for the Yankees against Geremi Gonzalez. Brown struggled early as Carl Crawford led off the bottom of the first with a single, stole second, and two outs later came home on Aubrey Huff’s single. But Brown settled down and shut out the Devil Rays for the next six innings, surrendering just four more hits before leaving the game after throwing just 77 pitches. “He was awesome,” exclaimed Jorge Posada after the game. “He got a lot of one- and two-pitch ground-ball outs, and that’s why he was in the game so long. He got better and he got stronger. He’s got very good movement on his pitches, a lot of depth, and that’s why he got a lot of ground balls.”

    Tampa Bay maintained its 1-0 lead until the top of the third when Lofton singled with two outs and stole second before Gonzalez walked Jeter. Matsui then knocked Gonzalez’s first pitch into right field, scoring Lofton. With runners at the corners, Rodriguez came to the plate with a chance to put the Yankees to top but instead grounded to third to end the inning.

    The next inning, New York took the lead as Tony Clark hit a two-run homer into the right-center-field seats. With one out and one on in the fifth, Matsui padded the score by slamming an 89-mph fastball over the right-field wall. Giambi was then hit by a pitch and Sheffield walked before Posada homered to put the Yankees ahead 8-1. They added four more runs in the seventh on five hits capped by Posada’s second homer of the night.

    At the end of the 12-1 Yankees victory, Matsui was declared the star of the game (despite Posada’s two home runs and six RBIs). In a ceremony held at home plate, Godzilla received a samurai helmet. He held the prize aloft “slowly turning his body as if he were a figurine in a music box as 55,000 fans chanted his name.” “Hopefully, we can have many more games like this,” he said during the ceremony. “I’m the happiest man in the world.”49 “He’s unbelievable,” said Posada. “He can come home and do all the things he did in front of people waiting for him to do it. That’s tough to do.”

    The two teams left Japan the next morning, arriving back in Florida on Thursday, April 1. Most of the players enjoyed the trip. “This town’s fun,” said Jason Giambi about Tokyo. “You’ve got to experience this town. It’s like Vegas and New York rolled into one.” Some sampled the nightlife in Roppongi, bought electronics in Akihabara, dined on sushi and sake, explored the city. “Tokyo is a beautiful city to visit,” concluded Lou Piniella. “I was shocked that there’s no trash,” said Derek Jeter. “Even though there’s thousands and thousands of people, millions of people, walking the streets, there is no trash. That was amazing to me.” “I don’t like being in a plane such a long time,” said Julio Lugo. “But to tell you the truth, it was worth it … to come over here. I had a nice experience. I love it. I love the fans here. I think they’re great.”

    From a marketing perspective, the trip was an overwhelming success. Matsui’s heroics and modest demeanor increased the popularity of the already popular New York Yankees. “[Matsui] did an unbelievable job of handling everything he’s had to go through over here,” observed Kevin Brown. “He’s so completely focused and comfortable. You tip your hat for a very professional effort.” “It’s mission accomplished as far as the state of the game,” added Rodriguez. “When you talk about growing the game, I think the New York Yankees can do that better than any other team in the world.”

    But not everyone praised the endeavor. In a vitriolic condemnation of the Opening Day tour, Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post objected to the early start times and blatant commercialism. Calling the trip “baseball’s grab-a-yen travesty,” he wrote:

    How trashy can baseball get? This Opening Day was surely a tip-off. … Baseball’s traditional spring showcase game – one of its supposed jewels – has now shared the same pre-dawn TV time slot as “this channel is not yet available” and a religious infomercial.

    The start of the baseball season is supposed to be a spirit-lifting American institution, an announcement of spring. Instead, what may be remembered from this game was that, for the first time in big league history, the players themselves were used as human billboards. … [R]ight there on the Yankees hats and jerseys – the ones that are considered too elegantly traditional to have the players’ own names on the back – were garish ads for various companies, both in English and in Japanese kanji.

    Let’s hope those Japanese fans bought plenty of Hideki Matsui bobble-head dolls because the price baseball paid to sell more trinkets and TV ads in Asia was high – in self-respect.

    The editors of the Japan Times, however, argued that Boswell had missed the more important issue. “[Boswell’s] displeasure strikes us as misplaced and unfortunate. … The truth is, baseball may be America’s national pastime, as it is Japan’s and some other countries’ as well, but the game’s future is a global one. … It makes sense to celebrate that fact rather than alternatively deny and decry it. Besides, … to watch the Japanese fans joyously root for an American team (the Yankees, of course, along with revered Hideki Matsui) is to realize the potential of sports as an instrument of friendship.”

    Read the full version of this article on the SABR website

    https://sabr.org/journal/article/godzilla-returns-the-2004-mlb-opening-series-in-japan

  • Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 4, Hideki Matsui

    Japan’s Favorite Players: No. 4, Hideki Matsui

    by Thomas Love Seagull

    A recent poll for a TV special saw more than 50,000 people in Japan vote for their favorite retired baseball players. 20 players emerged from a pool of 9,000. Yes, they could only vote for players who are no longer active, so you won’t see Shohei Ohtani or other current stars on this list. Which is probably smart because I’m sure Ohtani would win by default. There are, however, players who were beloved but not necessarily brilliant, and foreign stars who found success after coming to NPB. Unsurprisingly, the list leans heavily towards the past 30 years, with a few legends thrown in for good measure.

    Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling each of these players. Some of these players I know only a little about, so this will be as much a journey for me as, hopefully, it will be for you. It’ll be a mix of history, stats, and whatever interesting stories I can dig up.

    For now, have a look at the list below and see how the public ranked them. I’ve included the years they played in NPB in parentheses.

    20. Alex Ramirez (2001-2013); 19. Yoshinobu Takahashi (1998-2015); 18. Warren Cromartie (1984-1990), 17. Takashi Toritani (2004-2021); 16. Suguru Egawa (1979-1987); 15. Katsuya Nomura (1954-1980); 14. Tatsunori Hara (1981-1995); 13. Kazuhiro Kiyohara (1985-2008); 12. Masayuki Kakefu (1974-1988); 11. Masumi Kuwata (1986-2006); 10. Atsuya Furuta (1990-2007); 9. Randy Bass (1983-1988); 8. Daisuke Matsuzaka (1999-2006, 2015-2016, 2018-2019, 2021); 7. Tsuyoshi Shinjo (1991-2000, 2004-2006); 6. Hiromitsu Ochiai (1979-1998); 5. Hideo Nomo (1990-1994); 4. Hideki Matsui (1993-2002); 3. Shigeo Nagashima (1958-1974); 2. Sadaharu Oh (1958-1980); 1. Ichiro Suzuki (1992-2000).

    Of course they walked him. It couldn’t be helped.

    There is a scene from August 16, 1992, that tells you everything you need to know about Hideki Matsui.

    Matsui is standing in the batter’s box at Koshien Stadium, the great cathedral of Japanese high school baseball, its ivy-covered walls gleaming in the summer heat. He is seventeen years old and enormous. He looks less like a high school student and more like something assembled in a factory to hit baseballs. His bat is on his shoulder. He is watching the Meitoku Gijuku pitcher, a kid named Kazuhiro Kouno, go into his windup.

    The ball, when it comes, will not be aimed at the strike zone.

    It never is.

    The first walk comes in the first inning, two outs, a runner on third. Defensible. A dangerous hitter, a tight spot, the book says put him on. The crowd accepts it.

    The second comes in the third inning, one out, runners on second and third. Still defensible, maybe. The game is close. You can tell yourself a story about it. You can justify it.

    The third comes in the fifth inning, one out, a runner on first, and Meitoku Gijuku leading by two runs. This is when the crowd begins to murmur. The story is harder to tell now.

    The fourth comes in the seventh inning, two outs, nobody on base. There is no story to tell. The stadium turns hostile. People are shouting. The atmosphere has changed. Koshien is about pitcher versus batter, but there will be no showdown.

    The fifth, in the ninth inning, two outs, and a runner on third, is when the bottles and cans come onto the field. Empty cans, empty bottles, megaphones, anything people have in their hands. The game is stopped. The scene has turned ugly.

    And Matsui says nothing. He does not slam his bat. He does not glare at the opposing dugout. He simply takes his base, all five times, and waits for a pitch that never comes.

    Meitoku Gijuku wins, 3-2. During the winning school’s anthem, the crowd chants go home. The winning players have tears in their eyes. Their manager, Shiro Mabuchi, speaks to reporters afterward as if describing a crime he committed rather than a game he won. “I wanted to compete honestly,” he says. “But with the score close, this was the only way. I gave all the instructions myself.” The team’s hotel receives so many harassing phone calls that they are forced to change the number.

    The Japan High School Baseball Federation calls an emergency press conference. Mabuchi is criticized in every newspaper in the country. He defends himself by saying he had watched Matsui in practice and seen something that disturbed him. “There was a professional player mixed in with the high school kids,” he says.

    He meant it as a justification. It reads, in retrospect, as prophecy.

    Afterward, when the reporters find Matsui, he is quieter than anyone expects. “I don’t remember,” he says at first, and then: “I’m fine. It’s thanks to that I became famous. And I’m glad I didn’t get angry in the batter’s box.”

    Years later, he will say something more considered: “I wanted to become the kind of player where fans would say of course Matsui got walked five times in high school. It couldn’t be helped.“

    That is the whole story, right there. Everything that follows, the ten years in Japan, ten years in America, the titles and the injuries and the consecutive games and the World Series, is Matsui trying to become that player. The player who made the walks make sense in retrospect. The player so obviously dangerous that refusing to face him was not cowardice but simply the smart thing to do.

    He spent the next twenty years earning that description. He almost always succeeded.

    He was, from the beginning, physically preposterous. The nursery school teachers thought he was eight years old when he was three. By the time he entered middle school, he stood 170 centimeters (5’7”) and allegedly weighed 95 kilograms (209 lbs). He was a thirteen-year-old with the frame of a sumo wrestler, which was not merely a metaphor, since he also won a local youth sumo championship that year. He could, honestly, have been almost anything physical. He chose baseball.

    His father gave him a phrase to live by when he was in elementary school, written in brushwork on a piece of paper and hung above his desk: Effort itself is a talent. Matsui kept that idea his whole life, making it his guiding principle. He was gifted, yes—the swing was effortless, the power was outrageous, the instincts were those of someone born for the sport. But what the people around him noticed most was how hard he worked at things that weren’t natural to him, and how patiently he absorbed failure.

    He arrived at Seiryo High School in Kanazawa, one of the legendary baseball programs in Japan, weighing over 100 kilograms, and the coach told him to lose weight before he touched a bat. So he ran. Every day, he just ran, until his body was ready.

    He actually joined Seiryo as a pitcher. On his first day of practice, the coaches took one look at his pitching and asked him where else he’d like to play. His hitting in that same first session was something else entirely. He cleared the fence while the upperclassmen were still figuring out how to get the ball off the infield. His classmates, initially, worried that maybe they were supposed to be doing more. “Maybe the seniors aren’t trying,” Matsui thought. They were trying.

    He was 15 years old and batting fourth for a team of 18-year-olds.

    By his third year (and final since high school in Japan is equivalent to grades 10-12 in America), Matsui had hit 60 home runs in total. The way he counted them matters: he only counted balls that cleared the fence on the fly. No inside-the-park home runs. No cheap ones. A ball either went over the fence or it didn’t, and everything else was just running.

    It’s a good thing he did so much of it when he joined the team.

    The scouts who watched him compared him to Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the most celebrated power hitter of his generation, and then said Matsui might be even better. One scout, watching Matsui at the spring tournament of his final year, described the experience as watching a different species play the same sport. Matsui hit two home runs in his first at-bats of that tournament. When the Seiryo coaches were asked about his power, they mentioned that during summer practice, he routinely broke softballs with his swing and the team’s budget for replacement balls ran to over 100,000 yen in a single year.

    There is more. Behind the right field wall at Seiryo, five meters past the 91-meter (299 feet) mark, stood a ten-meter net placed there specifically because Matsui’s practice shots kept clearing the fence. Beyond the net, some distance away, sat the home of the school principal. On more than one occasion, a baseball was found in his garden. On at least one occasion, a ball was discovered lodged in the snow guard on his roof. The estimated carry on some of these shots was over 150 meters (492 feet). The school, concerned about the liability, took out an injury insurance policy specifically to cover the possibility that Matsui’s batting practice might hurt someone outside the grounds.

    Sometime in 1990, a first-year outfielder from Meiden High School named Ichiro Suzuki was playing a practice game against Seiryo. He reached base and found himself standing next to Matsui on first. Years later, when a reporter asked him about it, Ichiro laughed. “The thing I remember,” he said, “is that his ears were really big.”

    His nickname came from a reporter named Misako Fukunaga who covered high school baseball for Nikkan Sports. She was watching Matsui before his third year and searching for words. She landed on Godzilla because of his lower body and his prominent canine teeth. Matsui initially protested. “Isn’t there something cuter?” he asked. There was not.

    Then came August 16, 1992, and the five intentional walks.

    Here is what Matsui did after that game, and this is the part that matters most.

    He didn’t sulk. He didn’t complain to reporters. He went home and, somewhere in the weeks and months that followed, he turned the humiliation of being deemed too dangerous to face, of being denied the right to compete into fuel of the purest kind.

    He said, years later, after he had retired: “When I went to the Giants and people knew me as the batter who was walked five times at Koshien, I felt I had to show them with my results.”

    He was drafted by the Yomiuri Giants in November 1992, when the great Shigeo Nagashima was returning to manage the team. Four teams tried to draft Matsui: the Dragons, the Hawks, the Tigers, and the Giants. They drew slips in that order. The Giants drew last, and their slip was the winning one.

    Nagashima called Matsui personally that same day. Matsui had wanted to play for the Hanshin Tigers his whole life (he had grown up a Tigers fan, his father’s influence) but when Nagashima called, something happened. He said yes.

    Then, a few days later, a piece of handwritten calligraphy arrived in the mail. It was from Nagashima. It read: “Matsui-kun, you’re destined to be a star for the Giants. Let’s put in the work together and build something great. I’m counting on you.”

    Matsui kept it.

    At his signing press conference, while other young draftees talked about the players they idolized or the statistics they hoped to reach, Matsui said something different. Soccer, he noted, was growing in Japan. Sumo had its stars. Children were being pulled in other directions. “I want to give those children dreams,” he said. “I want them to come to the stadium to see baseball played live.” He was only eighteen years old.

    His Giants career began poorly. The professional game was faster and harder and meaner than anything Matsui had ever seen, and in the spring of 1993 it showed. His first professional at-bat was in an exhibition game against a young Kazuhisa Ishii, who struck him out on a curveball. He went home and, by his own account, felt something close to fear. It wasn’t fear of failure exactly, but the dawning awareness that the distance between where he was and where he needed to be was real and large. He spent that spring hitting .094 in exhibition play, leading the team in strikeouts, and looking very much like what he was: a boy with enormous talent who had never been truly tested.

    Nagashima demoted him in April. This was not a small thing. Matsui was the most celebrated young player in Japan, the boy from Koshien, the Godzilla of a thousand newspaper headlines, and now he was playing in the minor leagues because he couldn’t hit professional pitching. He responded in the characteristically Matsui fashion: he said he would make Nagashima regret the decision, and then he went out and hit .375 with four home runs in twelve minor league games before being promoted to the top team, ichi-gun, May 1.

    His first professional home run came the following day, off Shingo Takatsu of the Yakult Swallows, a line drive into the right field stands at Tokyo Dome so pure and hard that teammates said you could hear the difference between that ball and the balls other people hit.

    He finished that season with 11 home runs, a record for Giants rookies who had graduated high school, and Nagashima started making plans.

    The plans were elaborate. Nagashima had a system he called the Thousand Day Plan. It gave him three years, starting from the moment he drafted Matsui, to turn him into the player Nagashima believed he could be. It began four days after Matsui joined the team. From then on, Nagashima worked with him almost every day: in the indoor batting cages at Tokyo Dome on home games, in hotel rooms on road trips, in the basement of Nagashima’s own home, and on days off, at whatever hotel Nagashima happened to summon him to. Matsui once described walking into the Seiyo Hotel in Ginza, one of the grandest hotels in Tokyo, carrying a bat, because Nagashima had called him in. He was, he noted, probably the only person in the history of that establishment to arrive that way.

    One of the things Nagashima told him: calluses on your hands are not a sign of hard work. They are a sign of a flaw. If your palms are calloused, you are gripping the bat too tightly. If you are gripping too tightly, you are losing bat control. The goal was not to build calluses but to eliminate them.

    When Matsui arrived at the Giants, his palms were covered in them. By the time he left Japan ten years later, after the home run titles and the MVP awards and the thousand consecutive games and all those swings in all those hotel rooms, his hands had become smooth. The calluses disappeared as the titles accumulated. He found this remarkable enough to mention at his retirement press conference, twenty years later, when a reporter asked him what he remembered most from his career.

    He paused for a moment. Then he said: “Swinging the bat alongside Nagashima-kantoku. That might be what stays with me most.”

    In 1994, in Matsui’s second year, the Giants were in the middle of one of the great pennant races in the history of Japanese baseball. The Central League came down to the final day: October 8th, a Sunday, the Giants against the Chunichi Dragons, winner takes all. It is remembered in Japan simply as “10.8” the way certain games are remembered only by their date*. Matsui, just twenty years old, hit a home run. Yomiuri won the pennant. He was not yet the best player on the team. He would be soon.



    *Like one of the most famous double headers in Japanese baseball history, 10.19.

    By 1995 he was hitting .274 with 22 home runs and winning his first Best Nine award. By 1996 he was something else entirely.

    That is the one that defined the first chapter of his career.

    Matsui hit 38 home runs that year at age 22, a performance so good that it tied Sadaharu Oh’s then-record for home runs by a player that age. He was the engine of a Giants comeback that nobody had expected. They were trailing badly in the standings in midsummer, and Matsui almost single-handedly dragged them back into contention. He won the July and August monthly MVPs. He won the season MVP. He was, without question, the best player in the Central League.

    But the home run title is the thing that got away, and the way it got away was somewhat familiar.

    Going into the final game of the season, Matsui was one home run behind Takeshi Yamasaki of Chunichi for the league lead. So the Dragons, playing the Giants in the season finale, walked him intentionally in all four of his plate appearances. Nagashima had even batted Matsui leadoff in an attempt to give him as many chances to swing as possible and it didn’t matter. The Chunichi battery walked him when he stepped into the box in the first inning, and then again in the third, the sixth, and the seventh. Sixteen consecutive balls. Four straight intentional walks. The Tokyo Dome crowd erupted. Fans threw things onto the field, screamed obscenities at the Chunichi dugout, rained down a fury that the reporters would describe the next morning as unlike anything they had witnessed.

    He was 22 years old, and it had happened again.

    What nobody quite expected was how Matsui would respond. When the reporters found him after the game, they asked how he felt. He was, by multiple accounts, the calmest person in the building.

    “They did it to me good,” he said. “But it can’t be helped. Not getting the title is frustrating, but that time was more frustrating.”

    The reporters asked what he meant by that time.

    He meant August 1992. He meant Koshien. He meant the five intentional walks in the summer tournament that had made him a national story and a national symbol and, in some ways, a national obligation. Four years into his professional career, standing in the ruins of his first serious chance at a batting title, he was still measuring his professional disappointments against that afternoon. As if nothing in the professional game could quite match what it felt like to be seventeen and refused.

    In 1997, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the great Kiyohara, the man every scout had compared Matsui to when Matsui was still in high school, came to the Giants as a free agent, and suddenly the team had two of the most feared hitters in Japan batting in the same lineup. They were called the MK Cannon, a portmanteau of their names, and the partnership was genuinely terrifying for opposing pitchers. Matsui hit 37 home runs. He lost the home run title by a single homer, again. It had become almost a joke. He kept hitting 37 or 38 home runs and kept finishing second.

    In 1998, he injured his knee during spring training. He would spend the rest of his career managing his knee. But that same year, he finally won the home run title. He also won the RBI crown. He also won the on-base percentage title. It was the first time since Oh Sadaharu in 1977 that a Giants player had won both home runs and RBI in the same season. He was 24 years old.

    The next year, he hit 42 home runs, the first time a Japanese player had hit 40 home runs in a season since Hiromitsu Ochiai in 1989, and the first time for the Giants since Sadaharu Oh in 1977.

    By 2000, Matsui was the unquestioned best player in Japan. That season he did something that had not been done at Yomiuri since 1950: he played every inning of every game in the cleanup spot. Every inning. Every game. All 135 of them. He hit .316 with 42 home runs and 108 RBI. He won the regular season MVP, the All-Star Game MVP, the Japan Series MVP, and a Golden Glove in the outfield. His consecutive games streak, despite his injuries, stood at over a thousand.

    His final season in Japan was 2002, and it was the greatest of his career.

    For the first half of the season, his numbers were not remarkable. He had hit 18 home runs in the first 76 games. Then something changed.

    In the second half of the season, over 64 games, he hit 32 home runs, a pace that would have given him 70 over a full year. He finished with 50 home runs, becoming only the eighth player in NPB history to reach that mark. He also hit .334 and drove in 107 runs and won the home run and RBI titles, and took home Central League MVP for the third and final time.

    And then, after the Japan Series, after his Giants won the championship, sweeping the Seibu Lions in four games, he sat down with Nagashima, the man who had drafted him, the man who had developed him, the man who had listened to the sound of his swing in empty batting cages for ten years, and told him he was going to America.

    He called it, later, the hardest decision of his life. He said he used the word “traitor” about himself, because that was how some Giants fans would see it, and he wanted to acknowledge the weight of what he was doing. He was leaving the team, the city, the league, the country that had made him. He was leaving Nagashima. He had won everything there was to win in Japan and he needed to know if he could win somewhere else.

    He came to New York in December of 2002, signing with the New York Yankees. The tabloids announced his arrival with the headline: Godzilla Comes to the Bronx. He was 28 years old, and he was starting over.

    His first game at Yankee Stadium started out ordinarily enough. Matsui grounded out and walked in his first two at-bats. But then in the fifth inning, with one out and the bases loaded, he ran the count full, and Twins starter Joe Mays threw a changeup. Matsui hit it into the right-center stands. Grand slam. First home run as a Yankee, in the first home game as a Yankee, with the bases loaded. It’s etched into my memory.

    He came back to the dugout and manager Joe Torre nudged him back out. He stepped onto the top step and acknowledged the crowd. Godzilla lands in New York.

    He played 518 consecutive games from his major league debut before a broken wrist ended the streak in 2006. He played through bad knees, through allergies that sabotaged his April numbers year after year, through the particular loneliness of being a man who spoke carefully through an interpreter in a clubhouse that moved fast and loud. He missed significant time due to a wrist injury. His teammates called him Mats. Derek Jeter called him one of his favorite players. Torre said he had never seen a player who treated his equipment with more respect.

    Then came 2009.

    He was 34 years old. His knees were shot. He had not played the outfield in more than a year. He was a full-time designated hitter, which in the National League parks where the World Series would partly be played meant he could only appear as a pinch hitter. He hit 28 home runs in the regular season. He had been brilliant in the playoffs.

    The World Series was against the Philadelphia Phillies. He was relegated to pinch hitting in games 3 (he hit a home run), 4, and 5. In Game 6, back in the Bronx, with the Yankees needing a win to close it out, Matsui batted fifth. He hit a two-run home run off Pedro Martínez in the second inning. He singled up the middle in the third. He hit a two-run double to right-center in the fifth. When the game ended, he had gone 3-for-4 with 6 RBI, tying the World Series record for RBI in a single game. The Yankees won. The stadium chanted his name.

    He was named the World Series MVP. He was the first Asian player to win it. The next morning, a column in the Asahi Shimbun compared him to Ichiro, finding their contrasting styles: “If Ichiro is a razor, Godzilla is a machete.” The Sankei Shimbun called them “the statistical Ichiro” and “the memorable Matsui.”

    That second phrase is the one that stuck, and it stuck for a reason. Matsui’s career was not defined by its peaks but by the consistency, the seriousness, and the absolute refusal to ever be less than fully present, in good times and bad. He gave interviews after every game regardless of outcome. He polished his glove every day. He never said a bad word about another person. He never missed a game unless his body literally could not continue.

    Matsui hit 502 home runs across two continents in his career. He played in 1768 consecutive games. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018 and became the youngest inductee at 43 years and 7 months, surpassing Hideo Nomo’s record of 45 years and 4 months in 2014.

    He had learned something as a teenager, watching a pitcher throw balls deliberately outside the strike zone, and had carried it with him for the next twenty years: that the world would not always give you the chance to prove yourself. That sometimes the greatest insult was not the criticism but the refusal to compete. And that the only real answer was what you did when they finally threw you a strike.

    By the end, the fans said exactly what he had hoped they would say:

    Of course they walked him. It couldn’t be helped.

    Thomas Love Seagull’s work can be found on his Substack Baseball in Japan

    https://thomasloveseagull.substack.com